“It was a cold, wet, inhospitable day
and the rugged West Highland scenery looked menacing from where we
sat inside the warm croft house. As the light began to fade Alistair
got up to light the paraffin lamp. Then Maggie went over to a cupboard
in the corner of the room and brought out some crisp oatcakes, home-made
butter, cheese, jam and soft bannock, while Alistair put the finishing
touches - chopped leeks - to the mutton broth which had been simmering
gently over the peat fire.

Now into their seventies, they had lived all
their lives on this remote croft on the Applecross peninsula, accessible
only by sea until a road was built in the early 1970s. As we ate
together, it seemed like stepping backwards into the past. But not
a deprived past. These were rich satisfying flavours, tastes and
textures. Everything was home-made, even the mutton for the broth
was from Alistair’s own hardy Blackface sheep which
had roamed the heather hills winter and summer.

I made my farewells and left. Driving back
along the narrow twisting single track road I had no flash of inspiration
that I must write about these people and the special tastes and flavours
of their unique foods. But I realise now how much they influenced me.”

From the introduction to Scottish Cookery 1985

I grew up in a Glasgow tenement and was always
keen to cook. My mother encouraged me. There were grannies, too, who let
me mess about in their kitchens. One lived in a cramped tenement kitchen
in Glasgow’s East End, while the
other lived in an East coast fishing village where fish and shellfish - fresh
from the boats - arrived daily. I spent summer holidays fishing from sandbanks
and rummaging the beach for crabs and whelks. My first catering job (aged 16)
was in a Clydeside dockers' canteen, filling crisp Glasgow rolls with
fried eggs and bacon to start the day.

Later, there were other goals which took
me into teaching catering and then into researching the potential of British
Cookery at Strathclyde University’s
Scottish Hotel School. For a while I was also a professional chef in hotels,
one post taking me to the Loch Torridon Hotel in Wester Ross, which is where
I first met the crofters Alistair and Maggie.

Writing about food in Scotland began when
a publisher heard me talking about it on a radio programme. He wrote to say
that I sounded so enthusiastic he was sure I could write a book. Scottish
Regional Recipes was published in 1981 and the same year I began writing
for The Herald in Glasgow, and a few years later became their food correspondent,
writing weekly columns – including
The Business of Food – for the next twenty years.

In between there have been other books. Also
twelve years as restaurant critic for the Scottish Field. In the late 1990s,
I joined Grampian and STV’s
Scotland’s Larder, as co-presenter (with Derek Cooper), a series which
celebrated Scotland’s traditional foods and artisanal products. Over
the years there have been three Glenfiddich Food Writing Awards as well as
the Guild of Food Writers’ Food Journalist of the Year in 2001. I am
also a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, as well as a member
of Scottish Pen International and the Society of Authors.

In the last few years I’ve had a lot of fun with my grandchildren, fishing
and foraging for shellfish and seaweed on Scottish beaches - they live on a
Hebridean island. It was only a matter of time before this developed into a
full-time research project leading to a book on the history and origins of
Scotland’s remarkable seafood assets, a grateful celebration of the ocean’s
bounty.